Halsey is thanking Mac Miller for giving her the strength to leave a relationship that was taking a dark turn.
She discussed the rapper’s death on Dax Sheppard’s Armchair Expert podcast, calling his accidental overdose in 2018 as a “turning point” for her. “This is a terrible thing to say because I think it puts a positive connotation on a heinously tragic event, but it gave me the courage and the faith to leave the relationship I was in,” she said. “It gave me that real f–king reality check that I needed and I think it probably did the same for a lot of other people too.”
“I was lucky enough to be in a position where I was like, ‘Okay, cool I’m not ruining my life yet,’ but I never would’ve expected some of the people that I know and loved and lost—to see them go down that path so aggressively and so rapidly,” she continued. “I kind of recognized the spiral early and was like, ‘Alright, now I know.'”
While Halsey didn’t reveal who she was referring to, she shared that drugs were an issue in the relationship. “As a result, my currency of expressing love with them became doing drugs with them,” she explained, and added that “there was a lot of infidelity in the relationship too. It was like if I don’t do it with you, you’re going to go do it with someone else and then probably f— them and I’m going to take you back anyway because this is what we do.”
Only after she left the relationship, she was able to work on getting sober and managing her bipolar disorder. “One of the first steps of doing that was removing myself from a situation where there’s a literal chemical interference,” she said. “I’m going to remove myself from that, figure out what my baseline is and then kind of fix it from there.”
Creatively, Halsey shared that she’s “making some of the best stuff I’ve ever made right now, because the dark stuff doesn’t disappear, it’s just easier to access at an arm’s length now.”
Listen to the full episode here.